Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rationality !== winning, published by Raemon on July 24, 2023 on LessWrong.

I think "Rationality is winning" is a bit of a trap.

(The original phrase is notably "rationality is systematized winning", which is better, but it tends to slide into the abbreviated form, and both forms aren't that great IMO)

It was coined to counteract one set of failure modes - there were people who were straw vulcans, who thought rituals-of-logic were important without noticing when they were getting in the way of their real goals. And, also, there outside critics who'd complain about straw-vulcan-ish actions, and treat that as a knockdown argument against "rationality."

"Rationalist should win" is a countermeme that tells both groups of people "Straw vulcanism is not The Way. If you find yourself overthinking things in counterproductive ways, you are not doing rationality, even if it seems elegant or 'reasonable' in some sense."

It's true that rationalists should win. But I think it's not correspondingly true that "rationality" is the study of winning, full stop. There are lots of ways to win. Sometimes the way you win is by copying what your neighbors are doing, and working hard. There is rationality involved in sifting through the various practices people suggest to you, and figuring out which ones work best. But, the specific skill of "sifting out the good from the bad" isn't always the best approach. It might take years to become good at it, and it's not obvious that those years of getting good at it will pay off.

Rationality is the study (and applied skill) of finding cognitive algorithms that form better beliefs and make better decisions. Sometimes this is the appropriate tool for the job, and sometimes it's not.

The reason this is particularly important is in deciding what feedback loops to focus on when developing rationality. If you set your feedback loops as "am I winning, generally?" (or, "are the students of my rationality curriculum winning, generally?"), well, that's a really noisy feedback loop that's probably swamped by random environmental variables. It's not nothing, but it's really slow.

There's also a problem where, well, a lot of techniques that help with winning-at-life just aren't especially about rationality in particular. If you're running a rationality program with "win-at-life" as your goal, you may find yourself veering in a direction that's not really capitalizing on the things rationality was actually especially good at, and become a generic self-help program. Maybe that's fine, but the result seems to lose something of the original spirit.

The domains where rationality matters are domain where information is scarce, and the common wisdom of people around you is inadequate.

The coronavirus pandemic was a good example where rationality was relevant: a very major change disrupted society, there was not yet a scientific consensus on the subject, there were reasons to doubt some claims by scientific authorities, and your neighbors were probably slow to react. (I think rationalists did well at navigating the early pandemic, but, alas, also stayed in overly-stressful-lockdown-mode longer than was appropriate, and lacked some other key skills)

Building a startup is a domain where I think rationality is pretty relevant. There is a lot of common wisdom that is relevant. Paul Graham et al have useful advice. But because you need to outperform a lot of competitors, common wisdom isn't enough. You need to continuously model the world, design products people don't know they want yet while soaking in new information so you can continuously update and iterate. You need to stare into the darkness and admit major mistakes.

Rationality is particularly helpful for solving problems we don't know how to solve.

Rationality is useful for judges and jurors, who must accurately wei...